Грэм Мастертон - Famine

Mike Bull stared at Granger, face to face, for a long time. Granger was trembling, and there was white spittle at the corners of his mouth. ‘Okay – sure,’ said Mike, uncertainly. ‘But what are you going to do?’

‘A miracle,’ said Granger. ‘A contemporary, practical miracle. Maybe not the feeding of the five thousand, but certainly the feeding of the five hundred.’

‘It can’t work,’ Mike Bull told him, with hushed earnestness. ‘Granger, it just can’t work .’

‘Do you think Philip believed the miracle that Jesus performed would work? Of course he didn’t. The only way that anybody can ever believe in a miracle is to see it happen in front of his eyes. Now, go to the stockroom and bring me five packs of that crispbread and two cans of tuna.’

‘Granger—’

Granger seized the front of Mike Bull’s shirt, not angrily, but with intense religious passion. ‘It’s what we believe in, Mike. It’s what we actually believe in. And now’s our chance to show that it can happen for real. We can work a miracle, Mike, just the way Jesus did. Others have done it. Others did it in Jesus’s time, and Jesus didn’t mind. He approved of it. We can work this miracle, and at the same time we can purge ourselves of all of our selfishness and our greed. Don’t you understand me? This one act is going to be our salvation.’

Season said, ‘Granger, if you go out there, they could very well kill you.’

Granger shook his head. ‘No, no chance of that. I know whose voice comes out of your mouth, Season. You’ve tested me before. Tested me hard, when I thought that I was testing you. They won’t hurt me, those people out there. Especially when they see what I’m bringing them. Especially when they clear up after they’ve eaten, and realise how much they’ve left over.’

He was exultant now, feverishly excited and unstoppable. ‘Go, Mike,’ he said. ‘Go get the bread and the fish. And tell young Tony to make ready to open one of the doors, so that I can go out.’

Mike hesitated, but Granger repeated, ‘Go,’ in such a quiet and beatific way that Mike found it impossible to resist him. He walked down the aisle to the stockroom, and came back a minute or two later with five packs of Kellogg’s crispbread and two cans of Chicken of the Sea. Seven or eight of Granger’s closest disciples had gathered around him now, wanting to know what was going on, and they watched in awe as Granger arranged the food in a supermarket basket and prepared to step outside.

‘That mob sure looks unhappy,’ remarked one of the men, a bald, sun-bronzed insurance salesman from the San Fernando Valley. ‘I’m glad it’s not me that’s going out there.’

Granger laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘You are about to witness a miracle. Doubting Thomas. When you see what happens, you’ll wish more than anything else that you were me, and that God’s generosity and kindness was flowing through you.’

The man made a moue , and said, ‘Good luck, all the same.’

Tony was ready at the door, holding his .22 target pistol. As Granger came forward with his shopping basket under his arm, he said, ‘You sure you want to go? If they try to attack you, I may not be able to let you back in.’

‘Attack me?’ smiled Granger. He touched Tony’s head with the sign of the cross. ‘They will adore me – and I will bring them in here afterwards friendly and laughing. I doubted my faith until now – just as you doubt it now – but this is the test – this is the time.’

Season said to Mike Bull, ‘Do you really think we ought to let him go? I don’t know what’s come over him. One minute he was trying to persuade me that God had chosen nobody else but us to survive… now he’s risking his life to feed a whole mob of starving people with five packs of crispbread and two cans of tuna fish.’

‘I don’t see what we can do to stop him,’ said Mike.

‘But why does he even want to go?’

‘I don’t know. He’s always been kind of changeable. You know, up one minute, down the next. But I think he’s been worrying for days about letting other people go hungry while we’re all holed up in here. He tried to justify it, tried to think his way round it, but I know that it made him feel guilty as all hell. I don’t think you helped much, needling his faith all the time. I guess he thinks he’s found a way to solve it now. He feeds everybody outside with a miracle, and that means we can keep the rest of the food in the stockroom with a clear conscience.’

Season watched Tony sliding back one of the metal bars from the door. ‘Granger’s so messed up,’ she said. ‘I thought he was so together. But he’s so messed up.’

‘He’s been in analysis for ten years.’

Granger stood with one hand clasping his huge crucifix as Tony reached down and turned the key in the supermarket door. In his white kaftan, he looked thin, spiritual, and vulnerable, quite unlike the first time that Season had met him, and very unlike the day he had come around to see her alone at the house on Topanga Canyon. Outside, on Highland Avenue, she could see the crowds shifting and swaying in curiosity. She looked at their faces, and in a strange way their hunger and their fear had given them the same concentrated intensity that Granger was showing on his face. It was an extraordinary confrontation of utter need with utter faith.

Tony pulled open the door, and pushed Granger unceremoniously out on to the sidewalk. Then Tony locked the door again, and barred it. He glanced across at Mike Bull with an expression that meant – I didn’t want to, but what else could I do? Mike shrugged, and turned away. Mike wasn’t yet ready to have his support for the Church of the Practical Miracle and what the church believed in tested to the limit. He wasn’t yet ready to admit that he might have joined it because Mrs Linda Javits, divorcee, regular customer, and possible replacement for his dead wife Anne, was also a member. As it turned out, Mrs Javits hadn’t answered when Mike had tried to call her and tell her that the congregation was assembling in the supermarket, and for all he knew, she could be just as dead as Anne. He hadn’t told anybody, not even Tony, although Tony had noticed that he went into his office more often than usual, for a quick stiff shot of whisky.

Granger Hughes stood on the sidewalk outside the supermarket with the early-morning sunlight rising behind him. The cool breeze flapped his kaftan around his ankles. The crowd on the opposite side of the road stood silently and watched him.

Granger raised a hand. ‘I have brought you food,’ he said, in a clear voice, ‘I have brought you sustenance enough for all.’

There was a restless murmuring in the crowd. One or two of them stepped forward, until they were only a few paces away from where Granger was standing.

‘You should all be seated, as the five thousand were seated on the mountain,’ called Granger. ‘Then I will walk amongst you and distribute what I have brought.’

One of the men, with a pinched face and an orange floral shirt, said, ‘What’s that you got in the basket? Samples?’

‘This is all I shall need,’ said Granger, with great calm. ‘Are you kidding?’ asked another man.

Granger shook his head. ‘You may not be able to believe it now, but if you seat yourselves on die ground, I shall pass amongst you and you will see for yourselves how much is here.’

‘For chrissake,’ said the man in the orange shirt.

‘Yes!’ said Granger. ‘For Christ’s sake!’

He walked towards them with his wire basket on his arm. Season, watching him through the supermarket window, was holding her breath so tight that her heart was beating in long, slow bumps. She could hear Mike Bull behind her breathe, ‘Oh, my God.’